How to Cover Your Marketing Costs When Promoting an Event

If successful events can collectively generate that much cash for the world, your event can definitely add a few thousand dollars to your pocket. The trick is making your event successful. After all, there are a lot of businesses out there, competing for your audience’s attention.

That brings us to this post’s big question: How can one scrape together the money to pay for marketing costs associated with driving ticket sales and making an event a hit?

Keep reading to discover six methods that can get you the cash that you need.

1. Pitch Investors

If you’re throwing an event, chances are you’re doing so because you’re confident it’s going to generate money. By offering to share that profit with other investors, you may be able to get them to contribute to your marketing costs.

Working with investors that you don’t know requires that you put together a plan that clearly communicates your vision. This plan should be structured like any business plan and should let investors know details like when your event will be, who your audience is, how you plan on generating money at the event and what your marketing budget needs to look like to ensure a positive outcome.

2. Speak to Friends and Family Members

Don’t have the clout to get 3rd party investors behind your event? Consider talking to your friends and family members.

Friends and family are likely to be more lenient when it comes to what they’ll need to back your event’s marketing costs. Just because the people that you know are going to go easy on you doesn’t mean that you should take advantage of them.

Pitch your event to friends and family members the same way that you’d pitch it to a 3rd party investor. Share your business plan and collect their money with the full intention of paying them back plus interest based on your event’s success.

3. Take Out a Loan

If you have good credit, one of the easiest ways to get your hands on cash to cover your event’s marketing costs is to head to a bank and pull out a loan. There are a number of loan products offered both online and offline that should more than cover your monetary needs.

For example, unsecured personal loans can get thousands of dollars into your hands in as little as 10-minutes. They don’t require anything on your part to receive beyond positive credit history and a willingness to pay your loan back on-time plus interest.

For borrowers that have bad credit, you can check this resource for information on guaranteed approval loans. You may also be able to get a collateral-backed loan which will allow you to borrow against the value of your car, stocks, or other valuables that you own.

4. Get a Sponsorship

You should be pitching sponsors months ahead of your event to see if anybody wants to fund your marketing costs (or more) in exchange for being prominently featured in your event’s collateral.

For example, let’s say your event was targeted at small business owners that work in the trucking industry. It might behoove you to reach out to a big company like Schneider to see if they’d be willing to pay for portions of your event in exchange for having their name on banners, in your event’s program an in other high-traffic areas.

In that scenario, you’d get your marketing costs covered, and Schneider would be able to get their brand in front of thousands of truck drivers that might later be interested in pulling freight for them.

It’s a win-win!

5. Start Selling Tickets Well in Advance

Advance ticket sales are one of the most popular ways to generate marketing dollars. In order to pull this off, your event might need to already have a name for itself, so depending on your reputation, it could be hard to make this suggestion work for you.

Selling tickets in advance could be something that you do during an event’s previous year by telling your event’s attendees that they can reserve their spot for next year’s gathering at a discount rate if they buy their tickets now.

If this is the first year that you’re throwing an event, try having an “early-bird” special on tickets through your website. You can advertise the deal through free channels like industry forums, social media, YouTube, and via your business’s blog.

6. Refinance Your House

For those of you that own equity in a home, getting your hands on cash is as easy as going to the bank and refinancing your house. The way that this works is that a bank would assess how much of your house you own and lend you all or a portion of that figure. You would then pay the bank back in monthly installments plus interest as you would with any mortgage.

Get Your Marketing Costs Covered and Throw the Best Event Possible

Once you’ve managed to get marketing costs under your thumb via any one of the cash-grabbing methods that we’ve outlined, shift your focus to throwing an excellent event.

Marketing will get people through your doors. It will not guarantee that those people will enjoy themselves. The more valuable to attendees that your event is this year, the easier it will be to sell tickets next time around!

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